Let's Talk Disability

Let’s Talk Disability. Episode 8 with Professor Jackie Carter, Laura Macleod and Professor Claire Alexander.

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Hello, my name's Jackie Carter. I'm the EDI Disability Academic Lead at the University of Manchester and I've set up a series of in-conversation pieces called Let's Talk Disability. The reason for this is that I want people who have a disability and who work and study at the University of Manchester to have opportunity to share what their lived experience, their everyday experience is with somebody in a position of influence, a senior leader at the University. So each episode will feature two guests and each of those guests will have a conversation about what it means to have a disability at the University of Manchester and at the end of the conversation each will commit to one action, we're calling them 'One Things', where they will take away something from the conversation that they've had and do something with it. I hope you enjoy listening and we'll make of course the transcripts available for everybody. Thank you.

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JACKIE: So good morning and welcome to episode number eight of the Let's Talk Disability series of conversations. I'm here in the studio, which is quite dark today even though it's beautifully sunny outside, one of the loveliest days of the year and I have two guests with me who are colleagues, we are all from the School of Social Sciences so I'm really delighted to welcome Laura and Claire today and I'm going to start please Laura by handing over to you to introduce yourself.

LAURA: So, my name is Laura McLeod and I work in the politics department. I'm a senior lecturer in politics, international politics. I started working at the University of Manchester in January of 2011 so I first had a temporary post, that was 18 months, and then I was a postdoc for two years and then I was made permanent. Now that sounds easy but it wasn't but that's another story.

JACKIE: Thank you Laura. Claire over to you.

CLAIRE: Hi, thanks Jackie. I'm Claire Alexander, I'm the head of the School of Social Sciences. I've been in Manchester since 2012. I came in as a professor of sociology and I took over as head of school last year so I've only been in this role for a year. But I was previously director of social responsibility when I first arrived and then later director of research.

JACKIE: Thank you both very much. So as we know, the purpose of these conversations is to discuss the lived experience of having a disability and working with a disability at the University of Manchester. So back to you if I may Laura, for you to self-describe how you would discuss with people who don't know you, your condition, your disability.

LAURA: I was born with a profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and the easy version of that means that profound refers to the level of deafness I have so I have virtually no hearing or no useful hearing is the way to put it. sensorineural means in both ears and sorry, bilateral means in both ears and sensorineural refers to where in my ear that I'm deaf.

But the interesting thing is I actually wasn't diagnosed with deafness until I was nearly three years old and the reason for that is because as a baby I was considered to be too alert so in those days they didn't do hearing tests as standards on children so at birth and so it took three years for my mum to persuade the doctor to actually refer me for a hearing test. So yes, I had hearing aids and things put on and again children in these days were not trusted with small behind the ear ones so I had these huge great big boxes on my chest so I had those for a few years.

Okay, I don't consider myself to be culturally deaf. So culturally deaf refers to with a capital D, you know, you might have a group of people who meet each other who are or have a hearing impairment, they might all sign and communicate with each other in that way. I don't really do that. My family are all hearing. I went to a mainstream school and I didn't actually ever learn to sign so I don't sign at all. Other people sign better than me. So the really upshot of that is that I'm reliant on lip reading. So that kind of visual input is crucial for me.

I think it's important to note that hearing aids do not correct your hearing like glasses so hearing aids, they amplify sound but they amplify all sounds and it makes everything louder regardless of whether you want it to be louder or not and it means that I have problems with things differentiating between sounds. If I go to a very loud environment like a coffee shop, I hear everything at the same level as opposed to being able to sort out the same.

Lip reading, I realised during the pandemic how lip reading must feel for me compared to other people so lip reading for a long period of time is a bit like what people kept talking about Zoom fatigue during the pandemic and I was just sitting there thinking when people were sitting there talking about Zoom fatigue, I was like hmmm, that's how I feel all the time. So I actually get very tired during extensive periods of lip reading. It can be quite hard and I have to manage how much I do at any one time.

I think that also the other thing I think that might be useful to think about is that it's not just that I can't hear things, of course I can't hear things, but it's actually the reality of trying to navigate a world that is structured around the ability to hear and the additional effort that is required.

You might think about academia. Academia is structured around the idea that you can hear other people's ideas. But I'm not so good at hearing other people's ideas but I'm much better at reading other people's ideas. So there are things like that that are harder and there is an additional effort required to do those hearing things. So for example, lots of people think oh it's really tragic that you can't hear music for instance and do you know what? I don't actually care because I've never heard music. So there is no loss for me. I don't feel like I've lost that. So it's not that I can't hear things. It doesn't actually bother me. It's actually the thing around trying to navigate the world structured around hearing.

JACKIE: Thank you, Laura. Claire, I'm going to hand over to you. I've got lots of questions but this is a conversation between predominantly yourself and Laura. I'm sure you might have some as well.

CLAIRE: I mean I'm just really thankful we've had a chance to have this conversation actually just to even hear you talking about that experience because you're absolutely right that people I think very often just assume their experience is universalised and to talk to and to even hear you kind of expressing. I mean so I now have a hearing aid as a woman of a certain age and I realise that my audiologist said to me that you know you've probably been compensating for a number of years actually through the lip reader which is probably why I'm quite tired and quite grumpy a lot of the time but I increasingly am realising how irritable that even tiny my hearing is basically fine. It's mainly in meetings but how irritable it can make me when I can't hear what's going on or can't see someone. And it's frustrating for me now. I mean so I kind of have a small insight into what that must be like for you all the time but much much on a kind of more amplified level and also the way in which you're absolutely right that academic life is so structured around people who can see and hear.

I always think of academia as a very visual thing but I mean it's very interesting to hear you talk about that.

So I was kind of wondering I'm kind of wondering how you negotiated that through your academic career. So I was looking at your research and you don't do anything on your disability. Now in sociology a number of people tend to write about from their experience or from interests and questions that kind of come out from that. So my own work is on race and ethnicity because you know as a person of colour who grew up in a predominantly white British kind of family well entirely white British family for me questions of identity and racial identity have always been quite interesting and I don't I hope I don't just talk about myself but you use it as a platform for how you understand the world and yet you seem to have not done that and I was really curious about how that your positionality has impacted your choice of what you do because you do work on conflict resolution in post-conflict societies.

LAURA: Yeah I think that's a really interesting question and something I've been thinking a lot about lately. So I think you know I came into my research because I was introduced to feminist ideas in the final year of my undergraduate degree which is quite late I think That's too late final year. So I was introduced to feminist ideas and I was immediately kind of attracted to the kind of framework of understanding inequality and the power relations. So immediately I felt like it explained so many things to me those feminist ideas. So that is you know the way I went down with my PhD and everything because you're right, yes, I look at feminist kind of questions in post-conflict reconstruction and yes I think that the reason I don't do anything on my disability is because I think subconsciously or perhaps I have always been kind of feeling like that oh I shouldn't talk about that. It's almost not like it's a forbidden topic but like if I talk about it, then I'm not a proper academic you know I think there is an element of that.

I do think things are changing and one of the things that I find really interesting is that you've mentioned that because I recently became elected as the equality, diversity and inclusion lead for the British International Studies Association for my professional association and I've had lots of people say I need you to talk about your disability and so I've come to realise that actually I'm now in a position where I have to think about it because other people are asking me to talk about it and other people are saying we need you to talk about your disability and we need you to kind of understand how disability matters in international politics so I'm thinking about these questions now but you're right I haven't done until maybe about eight or nine months ago.

CLAIR: It's interesting so in sociology a lot of academics of colour talk about the burden of representation so the way in which who you are, woman, disabled, person of colour, whatever. So it affects your view of the world but it also affects how people see you and it becomes inescapable so the way in which you come to stand for a particular whole group of people even though you may have nothing really kind of in common with them so I was interested in what you were saying initially about not seeing yourself as part of the deaf with a big D community so that whole idea that you know yeah you come to stand for a whole range of experiences that become condensed into you and that can be really difficult and problematic I think so I'm kind of interested about the fact that you've not done that for such a long time and that you are now that transition to now thinking about what that means and what you can do and I'm wondering what in the last nine months have you know with people pushing that onto you I mean how has that felt and how do you feel about what it is that you think you can do in that space?

LAURA: I think that some of it is also linked to you know academic hierarchies so I became a senior lecturer in 2021 and then I was on maternity leave but I feel like you know, I've got more freedom now to do that. But I think it's also linked to that kind of relationship if you like with precarity and then with not being very senior so I think that makes a big difference. That burden of representation I think that's a really good point and I think that again it comes back to kind of feeling secure enough in your position to be able to do that but I also think that a lot of I mean, I wrote a lot of listening isn't that to other people and one of the things that I really appreciated about the EDI role that I'm doing is how both in my department as well as in the BISA for British International Studies Association is that it kind of shown me the complexity of that and I think making it so like my experience as a deaf person will be very different to another deaf person's experience for all sorts of reasons. I think it's the individualised experience of being disabled and how do you translate that to a bigger structural kind of issue? I think it's an interesting question. It's not necessarily a question for you.
CLAIRE: I'm just wondering as a sociologist, someone who loves categories and also wants to pull them apart, I mean how useful is disabled as a category to think of? So if you're saying that you know your experience as a deaf person is very different from another deaf person and then we're thinking about the kind of range of different experiences that get labelled under disability, increasingly more so with kind of neurodivergence and all those other kinds of things, I mean do you think disabled is a useful category to work with?

LAURA: That's a really big question.

CLAIRE: Sorry, I know it's impossible.

JACKIE: It's a brilliant question. Thank you so much because using Let's Talk Disability as part of the title, you know, questions the very nature of the word that we're using collectively, so I'm really glad you've asked it. Thank you.

LAURA: I think Jackie mentioned once to me that something like 24%, I mean you work in social statistics, was it 24%?

JACKIE: Yeah, the latest Office for National Statistics figures show that 24% of the population are disabled and then we're not talking about chronic illness, of course we also have people who have chronic illness who feel that the questions that are asked on national surveys and in fact surveys at institutions that people work at don't always capture their experiences so it's a really important question, the whole issue about data that we're collecting and whether or not, you know, we know that we're undercounting at the university, we know that we've got a huge undercount in terms of the people who do share that they have a disability or chronic illness compared to the national population so one of the purposes of these conversations is really to start to get behind that experience of what it means day to day, day in, day out, coming and teaching, lecturing, doing research, going to conferences, being an academic at Manchester with a disability in its broadest terms, what does that mean for the individual?

LAURA: Yeah and I also think as well that, I mean, I think disability will be something, you know, where your body doesn't allow you to do things by the general terms decided by society. So I think if we were to understand disability in that kind of way then you can begin, you know, you can begin to see how many, like one quarter of society but I don't think that's not one quarter of university population is it?

JACKIE: Not according to the data that we collect but therein lies, you know, the challenge.

CLAIRE: I was looking at the statistics actually, so in the faculty, the faculty says about 9% of their staff have said they have a disability in those forms, in the school it's a bit more, it's just above 12% which is still half what you're saying Jackie, the student number is a little bit higher around kind of 14% which might be a generational shift in terms of how one thinks about what disability means I guess but I was surprised it was that high which shows how, you know, uninformed I was about, I was kind of like gosh that's really quite a lot of people.

JACKIE: And you said yourself that there are reasons why people don't necessarily feel confident to share that they have a disability at the University of Manchester and for other institutions. So it's a challenge we have to get people to talk about and share what their needs are as much as what their disability is.

LAURA: But I do think though, especially if you're born disabled, that you are almost institutionalised into not talking about or not complaining, especially I think especially if you're female as well. So like this whole kind of perception of being a good disabled girl kind of thing I think translates into being an adult woman as well. So I think that is also the thing. So like everything I was all taught about how to behave in certain ways and how to, I wouldn't not to complain. I could be angry but not to complain. And so I think it's quite hard for people to actually speak about their disability because I do not actually think society is very open to hearing about people who are not the same because I think hearing about experiences that are not the norm are uncomfortable for other people.

CLAIRE: I mean, I completely agree. So the pressure to fit in if you're not part of that kind of whoever that imagined norm is, fit in, not make people uncomfortable, not talk about things unless it feels like you're making demands and people feel that they have to do something or fix something and to want to be taken on your own terms for everything that you bring as a person without people feeling they have to kind of compensate. I mean, I can understand some of those experiences, particularly for women, I think. It's a particularly gendered kind of don't make a noise, don't stick your head above the parapet, don't, yeah, never complain, never really even be angry.

LAURA: And I mentioned as well about the extra effort involved in lip reading. But I don't just use lip reading. I also have what's called a speech-to-text transcriber. So this would be where I usually do this for research seminars and conferences. Because to be honest, I can't lip read multiple people talking. I can't. Do you know how academics ramble, don't you?

CLAIRE: Oh, boy.

LAURA: You know, they're not always to the point. So I find it much easier if I can just read on the screen. So it will involve someone using, I think it's the same sort of thing that is used in courts. It's used also to do hand signs. But it has 10 keys of a keyboard and you do certain patterns of phonetic sounds and it will, you have a lead to a laptop and it will produce the words for you on the screen. So I read it almost like a subtitle of a television as somebody is talking. And it's great, it's fabulous technology. But I have to arrange and coordinate things that only maybe about 40 people who are trained in UK to do this. And obviously, as I said, they're used for courts, they're used for hand signs. So some of my work support workers are doing that. Well, I have to book these people in advance. And every time I have an online meeting, I need that because I can't lip-read online. So it's not right. It's 2D I don't know why, but I just can't lip-read online. And I don't rely on the automatic text because it's terrible.

CLAIRE: They are often, yeah, really terrible.

LAURA: So I have all that. It's great technology. It takes so much time to arrange and coordinate. It was only six months ago. I finally have, I now have a support worker organising that. And the reason that happened was because last year I wanted to go to my professional association annual conference, the British International Studies Association annual conference. And I spent, I actually documented on the recommendation of one of my colleagues, told me I should do this. I documented how much time it took. It took me 17 hours to arrange support worker beforehand. I had to decide in advance which panels I wanted to go to. You know how everyone else just goes, oh, that looks interesting. I'll go to that. I can't do that. I'll have to decide weeks in advance which panels I'm going to because I might need certain rooms. I need certain access and all of these things. So I decided that all in advance. And then there was so many problems with the invoicing afterwards. It took weeks to sort it out. And so effectively, I'm also, again, trying to do my job as an academic. My mind is being taken up by these kind of mundane things of dealing with invoices and basically being HR as well. It was just so much work doing that. It took up so much time and all I wanted to do was go to a conference.

CLAIRE: So the problem was invoicing the university to support that?

LAURA: Yeah. In this country, the government has a scheme called Access to Work. And Access to Work will pay up basically to cover the cost of any support that you need in order to do your disability. So the university pays the first £2,000, but that's been spent a long time ago. And so the institution has to pay the first £2,000, but anything beyond £2,000 is paid for by Access to Work. So the financing of all of it has never been an issue, although I do have to reapply to Access to Work every three years. So I have to make a case every three years. Yeah, I'm still disabled. Yeah, I still need this support and that sort of thing. They constantly say to me, oh, but you've overspent here or you've not spent enough here and all sorts of things.

JACKIE: Yeah, I'm going to chip in here because I also have Access to Work. And ironically, I have had approval for a support worker, but I don't have time to organise it. But I think you're getting at something that's really important because anybody who does have Access to Work approval, which is a department of work and pensions, it's a pot of funding that people who have disabilities can apply for. And it's very rigorous and you have to have a case worker and they have to assess your case. But once you get the approval to spend up to a certain amount of money and it differs in every single case, there is then a big overhead in enabling that to happen at university level. And I would say actually, Laura, I don't know if you would agree, but it's because the admin systems don't necessarily they don't they haven't had the training for how to support the disabled people. So the disabled person has been given a grant, say, and then the admin person doesn't realize that it's for disability of which part of that might be cognitively. I can't do a lot of the things I used to do, so I need support helping me to do that. But I don't think we have done enough training in our admin support staff to enable them to appreciate the impact it has on the individual in the way that you're talking about that.

CLAIRE: So where is the funding held? Is it held centrally or

JACKIE: : It's held centrally, but often in my case, in my trip that I've just travelled on, and I needed a support worker to go with me, as you know, the Disability Advisory Support Service enabled the fund to be made available so we could book the tickets. But then that needs to be claimed back. And it's a claiming back part that takes ages. Because somebody has to and we don't have that capacity within the schools. We don't have one person to help us claim back. So it has to go centrally and then it disappears into another black hole and it's and then it often falls back on the individual. So it will fall back on me to do my claim. And I'm sure in your case, yours.

LAURA: I work in politics. I'm interested in institutions as well and how they're structured. The Disability Advisory Support Service is located within the directorate for student experience. Yeah, I think you think about that.

JACKIE: Yeah, because that's where it was born from and the structures have changed and we have staff support now. But in terms of where it's located, you're right. There's an anomaly. It doesn't fit there for staff.

LAURA: So I think that's something. For example, my support worker would send me an invoice. I then take that invoice and put it into the application form, which is then sent to DASS and they have to sign it. Then he sends it back to me to sign and then he sends it to Access to Work. And then if everything goes really well, they will then pay up. But sometimes things don't go well. They query and all sorts of things. But it becomes like I've actually I've now got because I basically I just kind of I think my head of department, I can't cope. I can't do this anymore. This is too much. And, you know, he went and spoke to a couple of people and I think it was Jackie put me in contact with an external organisation that has been set up specifically to support disabled academics. To navigate the Access to Work process.

CLAIRE: Yeah, right. So I remember we talked, I think, just after I'd taken over as head of school. And I think it was one of the questions you asked at the politics department board about support, research support for disabled staff. And I remember you saying at the time that, you know, there was more that we could be doing. And I said, OK, and I did go and talk to the faculty director of research, Maggie Gale. And she said, what kinds of things would be helpful? So, I mean, this is a very classic example of actually where something very tangible could be looked at in terms of helping support those particular needs. I mean, that's actually really it's a really concrete example of where where something could potentially be done to help with that. So that's good. I mean, I'll feed that back.

LAURA: Yeah, I mean, honestly, generally, I'm kind of I feel I mean, look, I think like most academics, I really enjoy doing my research. Don't get me wrong. I love all aspects of my job. I love teaching. I love doing all the admins. I also really love my research. And I do feel like it is my research time that is the most encroached on. In part because the teaching and admin are always kind of like time constrained jobs. They're like jobs that have to be done there and then. So things don't get in the way of doing that. But when it comes to research, it's the one that is the easiest to let slip because there's no one saying actually that time needs to be protected. With the exception of when you're on sabbatical, sabbaticals are great. Everybody's invested in protecting your time then.

JACKIE: So I'm feeling that we're moving towards some very tangible suggestions for what we could take away from this conversation. Do either of you have anything else you want to sort of explore before we move to those last two questions that I ask each of you to consider?

LAURA: No, I think the only other thing I would say is that I mentioned briefly about how I feel more tired as a result of doing things. So I think it's because of multiple levels of cognitive processing I'm doing. So I'm reading all of these things as well as somebody is talking. It doesn't just filter into my, I don't know how other people hear things, but I assume that it kind of filters into their head. I don't really know. Whereas I'm constantly having to read, think about that and then think about the idea and that kind of whole other extra work. And that can be quite hard, you know, to do.

JACKIE: Do you feel that, Laura, you complemented your department and the school and you said to me before we started that, you know, you do feel you get the support you need. Is there anything that you feel would, maybe we come to this at the end, but anything you feel would really sort of make a big difference in terms of helping you recover from all of that processing, for instance, that you're doing?

LAURA: I think that kind of that recognition, I guess, that I do need a bit more space. Maybe I do need a bit more time. Is helpful, that it does take longer. I mean, I'm famously a slow writer, but it does take me a long time to get something through. It's not, it's not for want of ideas, it's for want of time to put these ideas into place. I think that's one of the reasons why I'm really interested in trying to kind of think through how does equality, diversity and inclusion matter in sort of research culture and how that can be made better, I think.

JACKIE: Thank you. And I will hand back to you in a minute Claire, but I just wanted to capture on this conversation that we have brought in some leadership support training for disabled staff and the first cohort is going through this year and I'll be evaluating it and Laura has a place on that training. So I'm particularly interested, Laura, as you know, in whether we're providing good training, personal development and leadership training for our disabled staff. So I don't know if you have any thoughts.

I know you're only halfway through, but is there anything that has been enabled as a result of you being part of that initial cohort?

LAURA: So, I've done training courses before, but this is particularly interesting to me because I don't feel alone in doing that. So I feel like other people, they have different kinds of struggles, of course, but I'm not alone in this kind of feeling. So there is that very nice sense of solidarity. It actually does make a difference. So it's nice to feel that I'm not on my own. That's good. I think a big part of it as well is related to that. It's recognising that I'm not alone in my frustration of being heard in many ways. So actually, I realise now that it's less to do with me being deaf, personally. I always thought I wasn't being heard because I'm deaf. But it's actually more to do with how you need to explain to other people about your disability and how your disability affects your ability to do things. But it doesn't mean you can't do these things, of course, but how it shapes that.

CLAIRE: I was just thinking, actually, the training really needs to be for people like me because I feel slightly ashamed after having had this conversation. This is not something I've ever really given a huge amount of time to think in terms of the practical things. It makes me realise how much I take things for granted.

Only recently, since I took over as head of school, for example, we realised that all the doors in Arthur Lewis, for example, open towards you, which is no good if you're a wheelchair user. Having someone's experience presented to you or seeing it, and I felt the same way as being a person of colour in a white leadership team, people start to realise that things are not quite how they had imagined they would be. So I realised I have a huge amount of learning to do, actually, and we are doing some disability awareness training, I think, across the university and across the school, particularly for PS. But I'm increasingly thinking we should be doing it for senior level, senior members of academics, our heads of department, anyone in kind of roles.

But I mean, I think with all of this training, it's the same with race awareness training or some ways you need to actually have people who will tell you what it's like and give you those very kind of concrete, perhaps quite small, but not so small, kind of things about how these things are really difficult. So I'm kind of thinking that that actually should be where the emphasis should be.

LAURA: And I also think that, wow, my experience as a PhD supervisor, I've supervised quite a few students now, and amongst those experiences, I've been made really aware of how intersectionality matters.

So there was a situation where disability and race intersected, and I think I realised as a supervisor, I have got to get involved, and I have got to fill in those forms for the students, because it was too much. And because I realised as a disabled person, I spend so much time filling in paperwork, of course the person finds it overwhelming to do that. I think it's little things like that. You know, the PhD supervisor can do quite a lot, I think, to help as well.

JACKIE: This is music to my ears, both of you. Thank you very much. We have an amazing disabled staff network, and we have three co-chairs, and one of them is a PGR, and she's also the co-chair of a disabled PGR group. And there's a real swell of momentum at the moment about making a difference to the supervisory experience of PGRs. But Claire, what you said, we need to do more, we need to do, there's a lot happening through the EDI directorate in PS spaces, there is less happening in academic spaces. And one of the things that I've been looking for is bringing in some specific training to support people in line management and senior responsibility positions, exactly the nature that we've been talking about here.

So there's a real appetite afoot, and I know with Duncan Ivison, who's our new Vice Chancellor, also tomorrow or the day after, he's also very keen to support more action, you know, movement to action. We know what the issues are, we know what the needs are, but we have to get beyond just knowing and do something about it. So that's a nice cue for me to hand over to both of you for the final question. At the end of each of these conversations, I ask each of you to ask the other a question, which I then use to hold each of you to account, and obviously everybody who's on the conversations more broadly.

So I'm going to ask Laura to start by asking Claire a question.

LAURA: What would be the one thing you were committed to do as a result of a conversation?

CLAIRE: Yeah, I think if we're thinking about the School of Social Sciences, I think it would be to actually have a focus on disability and what that means for our staff, particularly our staff, also our students. So I think actually it would be good to think about training for our senior staff, people in roles, heads of department, but also actually to humanize that by just having a conversation about what it feels like to be in the School of Social Sciences as a disabled researcher or teacher and think about what we can do together to make that easier, I think, in some ways.

LAURA: I think that would be, if I can answer that question, one thing that would make a difference to my lived experience at the University of Manchester would be, I'd love it if we could kind of bring together a knowledge of what is happening, because I don't think I'm alone in all of it. And I think there must be lots of people, maybe with the social sciences, who have an experience that needs to be shared. And I think if we could somehow kind of bring it together, I really believe we would start to see some patterns. We're social scientist's, after all, we all are, so we like to look for these kind of social patterns, I think.

CLAIRE: I mean, my sense is that we deal with things from a kind of administrative point of view in a quite piecemeal way. So we have a member of staff who has a particular need, we address that particular need, whether it's particular kind of lighting or a stand-up desk or whatever it is.

But yeah, you're right. When you were talking earlier about the kind of shared struggle,

I think that would be really helpful.

LAURA: I'm also thinking in particular in relation to doing research, because I think when we talk about meeting needs, we tend to think in terms of building access. I mean, they are the newest buildings. It's actually quite an attractive building, but it's not actually the most accessible as you are learning.

We also think about making it easier to do teaching, but I don't think we make it easier to do maybe the hidden aspect of academic life, which is research.

CLAIRE: So let's do an event on that and let's get people in a room and let's see.

It would be really helpful. Yeah, it would be a huge learning experience for me and for the school, I think.

I think it's really important.

JACKIE: Well, that's such an encouraging place to finish. Thank you both of you very much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. They're always tricky because we touch on some quite difficult lived experiences. The everydayness of being disabled is tricky.

But thank you, really, both of you for listening and sharing very openly. So I'll say thanks again and goodbye for now.

CLAIRE: Thank you. And thank you, Laura.

LAURA: Thank you.